This paper discusses the first incarnation of what came to be known as the “Frege-Geach” point. The point was made by Peter Geach in his 1960 essay “Ascriptivism”, and developed in “Assertion”, a 1965 piece. Geach’s articles launch a wholesale attack on theories of non-descriptive performances advanced by “some Oxford philosophers” whom he accuses of ignoring “the distinction between calling a thing ‘P’ and predicating ‘P’ of a thing”. One view that Geach specifically targets is H. L. A. Hart’s claim (...) that sentences of the form “X φ-ed” are not primarily descriptive but ascriptive of responsibility for actions. Hart explicitly accepted Geach’s criticism, and disowned his essay. I argue that he was wrong to do so. Perhaps the essay was worth retracting, but not because of Geach’s objections. I begin by restating and refining Geach’s arguments, in order to bring out the flaw he claimed to have detected in the “pattern of philosophising” that he took Hart’s essay to exemplify. I go on to argue that Geach’s original point poses no obstacle either to non-descriptivism in general, or to Hart’s sui generis non-descriptivist claim in particular. (shrink)

I propose and defend a proof-based account of legal exceptions. The basic thought is that the characteristic behaviour of exceptions is to be explained in terms of the distinction, relative to some given decision-type C in some decision-making context, between two classes of relevant facts: those that may, and those that may not, remain uncertain if a token decision C is to count as correctly made. The former is the class of exceptions. A fact F is an exception relative to (...) some decision-type C, I claim, if (i) the ascertainment of F is sufficient for a token decision C not to count as correctly made, and (ii) the ascertainment of the negation of F is not necessary for a token decision C to count as correctly made. I also recuperate, reconstruct and discuss some of HLA Hart’s early views on defeasible judicial decisions. These two projects are closely connected: the latter is a vehicle for the former. (shrink)